Is The World Made of Language (Milen Martchev)

SMALL MOUTH NOISES AN OPEN-ACCESS JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE, MIND & PHILOSOPHY
IS THE WORLD MADE OF LANGUAGE?

MILEN MARTCHEV
Hitotsubashi University
This paper examines whether the statement that the world is 'made of language', or that it is
'akin to language', as has been put forward under slightly different guises in the past by certain
philosophers, linguists and scientists, can be construed to offer a meaningful and deeper than
superficially metaphorical insight into human cognitive reality and perhaps even physical
reality itself. In the process, the nature of language and codes, some contemporary
developments in scientific discourse in the area of fundamental physics, as well as the
apparent recent surge in the use of 'consciousness' as a world-explaining metaphor will be
considered. Chief among the arguments made here is that no matter what strategy we choose
to go by in order to explain existence, and even if the human mind can conceive of the
possibility of some kind of 'ultimate' or 'unitary' reality, then that reality, whatever it may be,
resides where language and thought cannot penetrate; conversely, any humanly conceivable
state of affairs necessarily begins where language and logic doat the level of duality and
binary oppositions.
CONTENTS:
1. Introduction ------------------------------------------------------ 1
2. Code --------------------------------------------------------------- 2
3. From Hard Facts to Soft Wares -------------------------------- 6
4. A 21-century Ancient Paradigm: Consciousness ----------- 9
5. Conclusion: Back to Basics ------------------------------------- 19
6. References -------------------------------------------------------- 23
1. Introduction
During the last decade or so of the previous century, American philosopher, ethnobotanist and explorer
of consciousness Terence McKenna would frequently remark that the world is 'made of language' (cf.,
for example, McKenna et al. 1990; McKenna 1994a, 1994b). This is certainly not something one hears
very often and McKenna did have a penchant for exploring, on occasion, 'far-out' ideas out of
intellectual curiosity, but we can be sure that he was seriously committed to this notion and did not
entertain it just vaguely metaphorically, as he would explicitly say things like: 'We're born into what
William James calls a "blooming buzzing confusion", but by the acquisition of words we mosaic over
various sectors of this blooming buzzing confusion with words. We replace the unknown with the known
through the substitution of words and by the time a child is two or three they have completely created a
cultural mosaic of words that is interposed between them and reality. Reality from that point on is only
an unconfirmed rumour brought through the medium of language and every culture accentuates
different parts of reality so that, in a sense, every culture is a different reality. Language is the stuff of
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SMALL MOUTH NOISES Vol. 1 (2014)
the world, not quarks or wave-packets or neutrinos, but language. Everything is made of language'
(McKenna et al. 1990).
When asked to comment on such a statement, neuroscientist, fellow consciousness explorer
and pioneering dolphin communication researcher John C. Lilly tersely replied: 'No, reality is not made
of language' (Lilly 1998). As someone interested in 'higher' states of consciousness, he viewed language
rather as a barrier to perceiving those alternate realities. In the same interview he also says: 'You're not
allowed to remember once you go into [higher states of consciousness]. It's union with God. That's the
true yoga, and so you're nonhuman, so there's no way you can recount what happened. You have no
way of saying it, because it's beyond language. All those states are beyond language. Language is a very
poor instrument to express it... The descriptive [use of language] is very poor, and William James said
that the other realities are separated from this one by the filmiest of screens. I found that this screen is
language, so you have to abandon it when you're going to these other realities.'
So, apart from the fact that both these unorthodox philosophers like to quote William James,
we have no agreement as to the nature of the world in regard to language, and many people will
undoubtedly react to McKenna's statement with a Lilly-like dismissiveness, if perhaps for their own
reasons. Our suspicion is that if Lilly and McKenna had agreed on exactly what they meant by 'language',
then their notions would appear quite complementary and not so greatly at odds. In that way, language
does separate us from a common reality, including when it talks about itself.
Obviously, the word language can nowadays be used to denote things beyond the human
tongues, as in written language, computer languages, body language, the language of love and
information, among others. In this article, we will explore the question of whether there is some sense in
which we could meaningfully say that the world is made of language and what that might entail. For the
purpose, we will take a look at the role of metaphors in our relationship to reality, binary codes, recent
developments in physics and cosmology, and the revival of 'consciousness' as a nature-explanatory
paradigm. The least that can be promised at this stage is that if the reader happens to agree with the
validity of any of the arguments made in the following sections, then the reality of them in his or her
mind will have been entirely brought about by language.
2. Code
In a way, everything that makes up our mental and psychological experience of life is a metaphor. A
word often stands for something that we have experienced or seen, although linguists have long since
noticed that 'stand for' is not quite a satisfactory model of what language does. The signifier and
signified dyad (leaving other more complicated systems aside) that comprises the Saussurean linguistic
sign are both abstract mental constructs. The actual thing signified is only inferred to be outside in the
case of objects in our surroundings, but in reality exists as a kind of mental projection inside our heads
and the rest of our cognitive sensorium. Inversely, a newly acquired word or phrase can plant an idea in
us without having previously experienced the signified entity in any other way.
If 'metaphor' can be broadly defined as understanding one thing in terms of another, then we
can follow a whole chain of metaphorical conceptualisation starting with the most ordinary objects of
our environment. If we see a tree, we relate to it in terms of our mental representation of it, which is
undoubtedly very different to, say, a termite's; no two trees are alike, yet we apply our mental construct
to all of them through unconscious abstraction of hard-to-strictly-define salient features. After our
primary sign tree (already a metaphor) is in place, we can then push it to a level more traditionally
associated with the term as in the tree of life, or to still more abstracted metaphorical types of usage as
in cannot see the forest for the trees.
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As semioticians have pointed out, even our physical surroundings are metaphors that can be
'read'. A door is a sign whose connotations obviously include constructs such as 'walking through',
'knocking', 'opening', etc. Regardless of the actual shape, age, material, location and so on, 'door' is an
abstract concept that encompasses all doors and lives in our mind. What matters is that each sign is
unique, more or less, so that the whole discrete system of signs can be efficiently manipulated and
navigated.
Thus, metaphors are all around and within us, in a much deeper sense than just realising that
when using, say, the word 'manipulate' as we did in the previous sentence, the idea suggested has little
to do with our actual hands, or that by 'navigating' we do not really mean sailing. We rely on metaphors
at all expressional and conceptual levels of meaning, we create internal representations of the outside
world through our senses, and our natural languages consist of linguistic signs which 'unite not a thing
and a name, but a concept and a sound-image' (Saussure 1966, p.66). On higher levels of the linguistic
system, linguistic habits, speech patterns and narratives shape our experience of the world and much of
what we know or think we know is a rumour, fiction and a story. The common denominator at all levels
of cognition, thought and communication is that we use certain kinds of things (patterns of neural
signals, language etc.) to stand for other things in order to understand them. Indeed, the evolution of
language and thought can be seen as a progression and overlapping of metaphors, often embedded in
stories. As soon as we comprehend some novel concept or perceive a new aspect of reality and
represent it by referring and adding to prior concepts, objects, experiences, or systems thereof, the
newly understood entities themselves become cognitive objects that can later be used in order to think
and talk about even more things. Thus the metaphor, although always a provisional entity, is a natural
vehicle and medium of thought, and as such it is no surprise that metaphors are built upon metaphors in
advancing the human experience of the world, just as has been observed about all media in general:
'The content of any medium is always another medium' (McLuhan 1964, p.8).
The most paradigmatic metaphors of science in constructing an operational model of reality for
any particular age usually come out of mankind's dominant technologies during that time period. These
days, one of the overarching cognitive analogies is undoubtedly the computer (and computing in
general)a technology whose basic principles are fully understood by only a small minority of the
population, but about which most people possess an intuitive understanding as everyday users,
interacting with all its surface metaphors: windows, desktops, icons, scrolling, saving, sleep mode and all
the rest of what we call the human interface. 'The Computer' as a tool for shaping thought has added
itself onto metaphors arising out of older technologies like handicraft and industrial machinery.
Scholars of language and the mind, too, have certainly not been immune to thinking about their
subject in computing terms. In his theorizing on language, the prominent linguist Noam Chomsky
assumes that the generation of language involves two components: 'a computational system and a
lexicon' (Chomsky 1995, p. 20). By 'computational system' he means the system, or set of formal rules,
generating linguistic expressions (each of which consists of a phonetic and a logical component) for a
specific language out of the presumed invariant principles and pre-built options of the general human
language faculty. Chomsky has himself remarked on the power of the computer metaphor for the
current age by comparing modern conceptual models with the times of Galileo, when mechanical
philosophy (mechanical science) provided a 'criterion of intelligibility' and when mechanical devices
provided the major stimulus to the imagination, which is 'not unlike the stimulus today from what's
done by computers', while warning that 'it can lead you astray in both cases' (Chomsky 2012).
The psychologist-anthropologist duo of Leda Cosmides and John Tooby put computational
systems at the very heart of their conception of intelligence, while defining computational systems
within organisms as those parts which are designed to 'monitor the environment for specific changes
and regulate the operation of other parts of the system functionally on the basis of the changes
detected' (Cosmides & Tooby 2001, p. 153). This conception of a 'computational system' is obviously
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very different to Chomsky's, although not altogether unrelated inasmuch as a process referred to as
'computation' receives input and produces output according to some predetermined (genetic) rule,
similar to a computer program. Cognitive scientist and linguist Steven Pinker, for whom language is an
'improbable feat requiring intricate mental software', although not something people naturally think in
(Pinker 1994, p. 425), expounds the view that 'the mind is a system of organs of computation designed
by natural selection' (Pinker 1997, p. x), while observing that 'the computational theory of mind has
quietly entrenched itself in neuroscience, the study of physiology of the brain and nervous system' (ibid.,
p. 83).
Philosopher Richard Boyd identifies the 'theory-constructive' role of the computer metaphor in
cognitive psychology, with thought seen as information processing and certain motoric and cognitive
processes seen as pre-programmed; in the paradigm he outlines, the brain carries out computations,
information is encoded and indexed in memory store, and consciousness is often seen as a feedback
phenomenon (Boyd 1979, p. 360). It is worth noting how a concept such as 'memory', originally referring
to the human faculty of recollection, has made its way back into our models of the mind with strong
computing overtones.
So, what has computing taught us about the nature of language or more technicallycode? As
programmer and technical author on Microsoft Windows applications Charles Petzold (1999, p.5) writes,
'Code usually means a system for transferring information among people and machines', adding that
'There seems to be no reason why cats aren't called "dogs" and dogs aren't called "cats". One could say
English vocabulary is a type of code.' (ibid.), thus echoing the long-standing insight of linguistics about
the essentially arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign. More importantly, he goes on to state the basic and
(to our present knowledge) irreducible building block of a code, be it binary, Morse or something else:
'The key word here is two. Two types of blinks, two vowel sounds, two different anything, really, can
with suitable combinations convey all types of information' (Petzold 1999, p.8). In computing and
information science, this smallest information-encoding logical entity is of course known as a bit.
It is not hard to see therefore that languageand logicmust break down below the level of
binary opposition. We might try to devise a kind of language composed of only dots or only zeros (that
is, just one building element), but then without intervals between them (the interval effectively
becoming our second encoding element) we wouldn't be able to encode anything at all. This
fundamental nature of the binary code highlights the observation that (an arbitrary) difference is the
root of all possible meaning; as the father of modern linguistics Saussure himself remarks in his Course
in General Linguistics: 'in language there are only differences' (Saussure 1966, p. 120).
Thanks to computing, the fact that any kind of information can ultimately be encoded in a
system consisting of two symbols does not stretch the imagination these days when we talk about
language or codes, but does it hold true for what we call 'physical reality'? Can we relate the originally
'tongue-tied' but now highly abstract concept of language and take it to even higher levels of
abstraction while paradoxically attempting to explain matter and the universe, perhaps echoing St.
Augustine's search for a 'perfect language, common to all people', one not of words but 'rather, a
language made out of things themselves' (Eco 1995, p.15)? After all, although modern scientific man
would much prefer not to use quite the same religious metaphor, St. Augustine's view that the world is
'as a vast book written with God's finger' (ibid.) surely still has not lost its intellectual appeal.
Exploring this kind of connection may seem a little far-fetched, but the remarkable thing is that
it has been done before, and by some influential thinkers too. One of the great linguists of the 20th
century, Benjamin Whorf, expressed 'the idea, entirely unfamiliar to the modern world, that nature and
language are inwardly akin', while seeing that this 'was for ages well known to various high cultures', like
the ancient mantric and yogic traditions of India (Whorf 1941, pp.248-249). Whorf sees a 'premonition in
language of the unknown, vaster worldthat world of which the physical is but a surface or skin',
including insights from mathematics, which he regards as 'one special case of this relation to language'.
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For him, physical reality, like language, is a series of planes or levels, each with its own set of patterned
relations integrating themselves into patterns of a higher order. In language, that would be the physical
acoustics-phonetics-phonemics-morphology-syntax-discourse progression of levels, corresponding in
science to the progression of processes respectively studied by quantum physics, physics, chemistry,
biology and then moving on to the human and social scienceseach level of study working with its own
set of laws, patterns and causal relationships. In Whorf's own words, 'just as language consists of
discrete lexation-segmentation [i.e. words] and ordered patternment [i.e. subconsciously internalised
rules for combining phonemes, morphemes, words, sentences etc.] of which the latter has the more
background character, less obvious but more infrangible and universal, so the physical world may be an
aggregate of quasi-discrete entities (atoms, crystals, living organisms, planets, stars, etc.) not fully
understandable as such, but rather emergent from a field of causes that is itself a manifold of pattern
and order' (Whorf 1941, p. 269).
Around the time Whorf wrote the article in question, the word 'computer' still usually meant 'a
real person with a pencil and paper, engaged in arithmetical calculations' (Al-Khalili 2011), but there is
an important computing analogue here too. In computing, there is a progression of planes of
organisation starting from machine language, through higher-level programming languages and all the
way up to the windows and graphic design we are all familiar with. As cognitive scientist Douglas
Hofstadter writes, 'When a computer program is running, it can be viewed on a number of levels. On
each level, the description is given in the language of computer science, yet there are extremely
important differences between the views one gets on the different levels. At the lowest level, the
description can be so complicated that it is like the dot-description of a television picture... At the
highest level, the description is greatly chunked, and takes on a completely different feel' (Hofstadter
1999, p. 306). At some border-crossing level, obviously, software turns into hardware, and most people
would seek the beginnings of language there. But Whorf's insight, shared with a number of physicists
nowadays (as we shall see) is that physical organisation may itself be a kind of 'software' product from 'a
manifold of pattern and order' on another level: 'As physics explores into the intra-atomic phenomena,
the discrete physical forms and forces are more and more dissolved into relations of pure patternment.
The place of an apparent entity, an electron for example, becomes indefinite, interrupted; the entity
appears and disappears from one structural position to another structural position, like a phoneme or
any other patterned linguistic entity, and may be said to be nowhere in between the positions. Its locus,
first thought of and analyzed as a continuous variable, becomes on closer scrutiny a mere alternation;
situations "actualize" it, structure beyond the probe of the measuring rod governs it; three-dimensional
shape there is none' (Whorf 1941, p. 269).
On a less cosmic level, for communication theorist Marshall McLuhan, the impetus for
mankind's Euclidian imprint on physical reality and the catalyst for the advent of mechanical machines
with their interchangeable parts can themselves be traced back to particular linguistic technologies
the alphabet and print. He may be accused of over-generalising but is, in our view, justified in
highlighting this important connection: 'The full-blown city coincides with the development of writing
especially of phonetic writing, the specialist form of writing that makes a division between sight and
sound. It was with this instrument that Rome was able to reduce the tribal areas to some visual order...
Roman roads and Roman streets were uniform and repeatable wherever they occurred. There was no
adaptation to the contours of local hill or custom' (McLuhan 1964, p.99-100). And later on:
'Repeatability is the core of the mechanical principle that has dominated our world, especially since the
Gutenberg technology. The message of the print and of typography is primarily that of repeatability.
With typography, the principle of movable type introduced the means of mechanizing any handicraft by
the process of segmenting and fragmenting an integral action' (ibid. p.160). Today, we speak of a digital
age and computing is supposed to be intimately tied to numbers, but McLuhan was well aware that,
ultimately, 'the digital computer substitutes "yes" and "no" for numbers' (McLuhan 1964, p.110).
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This linguistic-at-its-heart yes/no technology and the light-speed networks we have built around
it are similarly having a profound impact on us and our environment. In arguing that we are living in a
world designed forand increasingly controlled byalgorithms, MIT Media Lab professor Kevin Slavin
points out the fact that 'we're running through the United States with dynamite and rock saws so that
an algorithm can close the deal three microseconds faster... we're actually terraforming the Earth itself
with this kind of algorithmic efficiency' (Slavin 2011).
In times like these, it is no surprise that notions such as code and information are increasingly
being turned to by physicists as possibly representing a more fundamental realm from which things that
we call 'physical' may arise. This is the subject of the following section.
3. From Hard Facts to Soft Wares

After several centuries of rationalist science, we have learned that the universe is largely 'empty' space.
Atoms and their ingredients are much like outer space with its planets and starsconsisting mostly of
'nothing'. A big branch of experimental physics is determined to find ever smaller elementary particles
and we hear of occasional successes such as the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2013. One wonders,
however, if building bigger and bigger accelerators to find smaller and smaller particles is ultimately the
right approach, and whether we can really ever observe the smallest possible building block of the
universe. Hence the intellectual appeal of fractals which were better defined and understood in the
twentieth century, thanks to computers. These are intricate geometric patterns built out of simple
complex-number equations that are bounded in space and yet offer an infinite number and variety of
repeating patterns across different scales. Understanding the principle of change of form across scales
certainly seems like a far more efficient and far-reaching method of discovery in the physical world.
The intellectual foundations behind much of the modern experimental endeavours in
fundamental physics can be traced to what quantum physicist Amit Goswami has called 'the upward
causation model' of the (scientific) materialist. He sums up this paradigm in the following way: 'All
things consist of elementary particles of matter and their interactions. Everything in the world can be
understood from this one hypothesis. Elementary particles form conglomerates called atoms. Atoms
form bigger conglomerates called molecules. Molecules form cells; some of these cells form the
conglomerate we call the brain. And the brain comes up with our ideas... In this philosophy called
scientific materialism or material monism or simply materialism, cause rises upward from the
elementary particles' (Goswami 2008, pp. 16-17).
However, in a post-quantum mechanics world many are beginning to re-evaluate and challenge
this hard-headed model so dominant in the previous century. This is evident even from the popular
download of the findings of theoretical and quantum physics, or anything physicists say without
resorting to complex mathematical equations.
In a BBC documentary entitled 'Everything and Nothing', theoretical physicist Jim Al-Khalili
explains about the riddle of empty space: 'Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle had suggested that matter
could pop into existence for incredibly short periods of time. [Paul] Dirac had provided the mechanism
by which matter could be created out of the vacuum and, just as quickly, disappear again... Whenever a
particle pops out of empty space, so simultaneously does its anti-particle. Although this sounds
completely ridiculous, let me assure you that it is true. So, whenever you try to remove everything you
can from empty space, it's still always awash with all these fluctuations. Within nothingness, there's a
kind of fizzing, a dynamic dance as pairs of particles and anti-particles borrow energy from the vacuum
for brief moments before annihilating and paying it back again... Dirac's ideas about empty space were
defined and developed into what is known today as "quantum field theory". And these strange fleeting
things within "nothing" became known as "virtual particles"' (Al-Khalili 2011).
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So, strange as it sounds, matter and anti-matter are inherently potentially present even in
'empty' space. Of course, the space inside the experimental container that scientists use to observe
these effects is already part of the fabric of our world's space-time, and so might be different from the
'void' that the universe may or may not have sprung out of, while the fact the 'vacuum' is full of these
pairs of virtual particles stretches the meaning of that word quite a bit. We can nonetheless see in
principle that seeming 'nothing' is in fact quite 'something', but also that this 'something' has already
and necessarily appeared in the form of a binary opposition, particle and anti-particle in our case. Is it
just a coincidence that perhaps the most basic observable spontaneous appearance of 'matter' and the
simplest form of a code are fundamentally of the same binary nature? Is the fluctuating vacuum
something like a primary encoding medium for all matter?
Another example that challenges standard scientific materialism and brings an informational
touch to physics are the discoveries of a group of leading physicists whose work centres around
something called the Holographic Principle (explained below). In fact, the person that first proposed the
principle, Dutch theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Gerard t Hooft, does not leave much doubt
about the fact that the computer metaphor heavily informs his vision of the world: 'It's a vision that the
universe is very much like an information processing machine. I like to view nature as a gigantically big
computer, that has information going into it and information comes out, processed. The processors are
the laws of nature' (Hockenberry, Hooft et al. 2011).
In the introduction to the 2011 World Science Festival Panel Discussion on the Holographic
Principle (featuring Hooft along with Edward Susskind, mentioned below) theoretical physicists Peter
Galison and Brian Greene state that, according to the said principle, all the things that are falling inside a
black hole are 'somehow captured as a preserved image at the horizon itself. All the information about
those objectswhat they were like in their three dimensional existence was preserved or encoded on
the surface of the black hole. That's a little bit like a hologram... That suggests that maybe that idea
may apply more broadly to the universe as a whole. Maybe the three-dimensional objectsus,
everything, the world around usmaybe all the information in these objects is carried, is smeared
around a distant two dimensional surface that surrounds us and we are, in some sense, a holographic
projection of that distant data. The holographic principle tells us something quite astonishing. It says
that our ideas of "volume", of the "real world", in a sense, might be a kind of illusion' (Hockenberry,
Hooft et al. 2011).
Mathematical physicist Robbert Dijkgraaf has echoed this idea in a recent public lecture: 'Inside
the black hole, space and time come to an end, but it does not really end. Basically this theory says just
cut it off, create a screen, which is the thing that surrounds the black hole, forget anything inside, and
project all of physics in terms of the information on that black hole horizon, the zeros and ones that are
sitting there. It is a rather radical idea because it tells you that there is information in the underlying
layer of understanding all of quantum geometrical physics' (Dijkgraaf 2012).
Holography is a technology for producing three dimensional images (holograms), by letting two
beams of light, coming from a single source, interfere on a photosensitive recording medium
(photographic film etc.), where one beam is shined directly onto the film and the other comes in contact
with the recording medium having illuminated a scene or object that we wish to record. The resulting
image produced by this interference looks random, scrambled and nothing like the original object, but
upon shining a light, identical to the one used to record the hologram, a virtual 3-D copy of that original
object can be reproduced. Even more, as eminent theoretical physicist and proponent of the
Holographic Principle Leonard Susskind says, 'If you made the hologram from an MRI scan, you could
actually code the full three-dimensionality' (Susskind 2011). One of the fundamental insights of the
principle is that the maximum number of 'hidden bits of information' (or its entropy, to use the formal
term used in both physics and information science) in a black hole is equal to, counter-intuitively, the
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area of the horizon measured in Planck units of area1, as discovered by Jacob Bekenstein circa 1972
(ibid.). This, combined with the insight that 'you can describe any region of space by data on the surface,
as if it were a hologram' (ibid.) means that the whole three dimensional universe may be encoded in the
form of two dimensional data on its surface, scrambled and seemingly random. It is not too much of a
leap of the imagination then to wonder if such a lower-dimensional and discrete (i.e. digital) data
organisation, when 'projected' in the right way may give us the world we experience. In the words of
Bekenstein himself, 'our universe, which we perceive to have three spatial dimensions, might instead be
"written" on a two-dimensional surface, like a hologram. Our everyday perceptions of the world as
three-dimensional would then be either a profound illusion or merely one of two alternative ways of
viewing reality' (Bekenstein 2003, p.60).
Thus, dimensionality itself can be seen as an emergent 'illusion', arising from a more primitive
organisation of data. But two dimensions cannot really be the beginning of the story, one begins to
suspect at this point. Indeed, on the day after the above-mentioned World Science Festival event, in a
panel discussion on Digital Physics at the same venue, computer scientist Jrgen Schmidhuber stated:
'What we are doing today is essentially go one step further and even ignore the 2-D structure of
information, and take into account the possibility that it's actually a one-dimensional program, a simple
bit-string that is running, that is explaining in a compact form everything that you find on these 2-D
"bubbles". All the information that is created, as the universe is evolving, is actually contained (and this
is a hypothesis but it's not totally implausible) in a very short program that is running the entire
evolution of this universe' (Hockenberry, Fredkin et al. 2011). Anyone who has seen an animated video
of a 'fractal zoom' can certainly imagine such a state of affairs.
If we wish to be even more ambitious, we might add here that the fundamental structure of
information, i.e. bits, is 'essentially dimensionless' (cf. Bekenstein 2003, p. 60), but the idea that systems
seemingly as complex as living organisms can be derived from a short set of rules or computer code has
already been vividly demonstrated by mathematician John Conway's 'Game of Life' in a twodimensional grid of square cells, each with two possible states (dead or alive, i.e. on or off). Given just
four basic rules governing how cells are born or die and an initial state comprised of a few live cells, the
system spontaneously evolves with 'surprising results', where 'shapes appear and disappear
spontaneously', and 'there are whole kinds of objects'species'that interact', and 'some can even
reproduce just as life does' (cf. Hawking 2012).
Another participant in the latter of the above panel discussions was physicist and computer
scientist Edward Fredkin, widely considered one of the fathers of Digital Physics, who has more recently
developed his thinking and work in terms of 'Digital Philosophy' (DP), defining it as a 'new way of
thinking about how things work.... it is based on the general concept of replacing normal mathematical
models, such as partial differential equations, with Digital Mechanics. DP is based on two concepts: bits,
like the binary digits in a computer, correspond to the most microscopic representation of state
information; and the temporal evolution of state is a digital informational process similar to what goes
on in the circuitry of a computer processor' (Fredkin 2003, p.189). Later on, he adds that 'Computers and
their software are the most complex things ever made by man. However, computation is based on the
simplest principles ever discovered. Our world is complex and we are looking for simple models that
might be at the bottom' (ibid. p.191).
Digital Physics is certainly one the most striking contemporary examples of how the computing
paradigm is reshaping and refining scientific thinking, and quite possibly advancing scientific knowledge.
More fundamentally, it tries to explain the world in simpler terms than its predecessors. In the words of
quantum-mechanical engineer Seth Lloyd, 'every time something happens, you can actually do a
1
-33
The square of the Planck length. The Planck length, or about 10

quantum mechanics. (cf., e.g., Bekenstein 2003).
cm is the fundamental length scale related to gravity and
8
calculation to find out how many bit-flips are necessary to simulate the universe' (Hockenberry, Fredkin
et al. 2011). The study of matter and motion under the guise of Digital Physics has reached a state
where it can begin to explore its subject matter in informational terms and the simplest form of
languagebinary code. The above-mentioned Conway's Game of Life clearly shows, in principle, that
something like motion in space can be seen as a phenomenon emerging out of a grid of discrete on/off
cells and a simple program.
The idea that physical categories are at bottom of the nature of code is something that
McKenna himself understood and was undoubtedly one reason for his statement quoted in the
introduction. In his words, 'This realization that everything is code, and code moving on many levels is, I
think, more primary than the perception, for example, that things are made of space, time, matter and
energy. Thats one level below code. The code codes for space, time, matter and energy' [emphasis
added] (McKenna 1999). A closely-related observation was made by holographic physicist Jacob
Bekenstein: 'a century of developments in physics has taught us that information is a crucial player in
physical systems and processes. Indeed, a current trend, initiated by John A. Wheeler of Princeton
University, is to regard the physical world as made of information, with energy and matter as
incidentals' (Bekenstein 2003, p. 59).
Incidentally, the contingent nature of physical 'reality' upon language (in respect to both the
fundamental terms in which we conceive of it and, in a wider sense, the metaphors that provide food for
scientific paradigms) is not lost on at least some scientists working within the field of Digital Physics. For
example, theoretical physicist Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara says: 'So, how could you do physics
without space-time? There, information gives you a rather convenient language. You could talk about
information, which in a way is a way to cheat, a way not to make any statements about the ontology,
because often ontology can confuse you, rather than help you. So, it's easier to talk about information
and try to see if that information has the right properties that you want, and hold off the interpretation
in terms of [whether] space-time is really fundamental until later' (Hockenberry, Fredkin et al. 2011).
Earlier in the same discussion, she has already remarked: 'It's a Zeitgeist question. We live in a time
when we understand the world in terms of computers, and I think and describe the world in terms of
computers. If I lived at a different time, the universe might be a big clock. So now it's a big computer.
Which is a good thing, because I can use all those tools that the computer scientists have' (ibid.).
If the computer has been one of the prime intellectual tools and useful metaphors advancing
and adumbrating our notions of both the fundamental nature of language and possibly reality itself, let
us next take a look at a new paradigm which has been gaining ground of late as a fundamentum for
explaining the world, although at the same time it is also very ancient. And it might be fitting at this
point to allow a physicist to lead us into it. Thomas Campbell, large-system simulation expert and yet
another proponent of the idea that reality is fundamentally digital and akin to a computer simulation,
has this to say in the last book of his trilogy, called 'My Big TOE' (TOE standing for 'Theory of
Everything'): 'Contemporary physicist Edward Fredkin and his Digital Physics movement make the
digital connection (quantized space and time) and are heading in the right direction, as were Einstein,
Bohr, and Bohm, but they are missing a solid connection to consciousness. Digital physics has not yet
discovered that consciousness is the computer' [emphasis added] (Campbell 2003, p. 34).
4. A 21-century Ancient Paradigm: Consciousness

'At the beginning of the 21st century humanity is poised for a revolution in our understanding of
consciousness, as the first-person modes of inquiry of the contemplative traditions of the world are
integrated with the third-person methods of modern science.' From the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness
Studies website
9
In recent years, the word 'consciousness' has frequently been used by people who try to peer deeper
into the nature of reality, or those who strive for insights into the mysteries of the cosmos and the self.
Among contemporary seekers for meaningful answers to these questions, there seems to be a growing
perception that consciousness is the primary stuff of the world and is thus more fundamental than
matter. The reasons for the apparent ongoing shift from science's well-established materialist models of
existence to a new set of more 'spiritual' ideas may be looked for in many places, such as the increasing
permeation of Eastern thought in the West facilitated by modern media, the popularisation of
disciplines like Yoga and Zen Buddhism around the world, the ontological shifts necessitated by
quantum physics, the ever-growing research in areas such as near-death and out-of-body experiences,
New Age narratives of the power of the mind and the eternity of the spirit, or the dissatisfaction of some
people in rich countries with happiness being defined as the mere accumulation of material goods.
These days, it is not unusual to see meditation sessions offered at Google's headquarters (see,
for example, Young 2010 and Freeman 2012) or mind-centred techniques for prosperity peddled to
ambitious businessmen, such as the so-called 'Law of Attraction'. There is even what has sometimes
been dubbed an 'archaic revival' the rising interest in ancient practices such as shamanism, with wellto-do people from around the world travelling to places like the Peruvian, Bolivian or Brazilian rainforest
to take part in shamanic ceremonies and experience visions and alternative perceptions of reality.
What all these developments of the 'post-modern' world have in common is that, in one way or
another, they place the self or consciousness at the centre of the human cosmos and the universenow
a place in which observer and observed are inseparable, just like time became inseparable from space
after Einstein's theories. At the same time, the development of modern technology and artificial
intelligence is likely to make questions regarding consciousness even more pertinent to our lives. 'Her', a
2013 American movie exploring the implications of 'dating' an operating system, is just one recent
example of how such issues are already trickling into our social reality. In academia too, there has been
'a major resurgence of scientific and philosophical research into the nature and basis of consciousness',
dating back to the 1980s and 90s (Van Gulick 2011). So, if consciousness is to be a re-emergent
fundamental paradigm for explaining and relating to the world in the 21st century, rivalling established
materialist views, we might well ask the question: What is it?
Memologist Susan Blackmore, who has written extensively on the subject and has interviewed
some of the 'great minds of our time, major philosophers, and renowned scientists' (cf. Blackmore 2006),
tells us that while at the start of the this century 'consciousness studies is thriving', the 'mystery is as
deep as ever' (Blackmore 2005, p.1). According to her, there is no generally agreed definition of
'consciousness', but we can think of it as what it's like to be something, or in terms of phenomenality (the
way things seem to the self, subjectivity) and qualiathe ineffable subjective qualities of experience, like
the redness of red. Moreover, Blackmore is of the opinion that even though many people have claimed
to have solved the mystery of consciousness in terms of grand unifying theories, quantum mechanical
theories, or spiritual theories, most of them 'simply ignore the yawning chasm between the physical and
mental worlds' and that 'as long as they ignore this problem they are not really dealing with
consciousness at all' (Blackmore 2005, p.2). There are some important assumptions made even just in
the last two statements and one can start an arbitrarily long debate about them, but such is the
ouroboric and tautological nature of the matter, the fact that consciousness is forced to investigate
itselfa 'strange loop' par excellence in the terminology of Douglas Hofstadter (see discussion below).
As philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel puts it, 'something apparently preposterous, it seems, must be true of
consciousness' (Schwitzgebel 2011, p.x), while physicist-turned-psychologist Daniel Wegner's spin on it
is that 'you need somehow to be objective about subjectivity, which is the deepest conundrum we can
think of' (Blackmore 2006, p. 246).
10
Given this intractable character of the central problem of consciousness, it is no wonder that it
has been called 'the hard problem' by philosopher David Chalmers, i.e. the problem of the phenomenal
world of subjective experience and qualia, as distinguished by 'easy problems', such as 'the ability to
discriminate, categorize and react to environmental stimuli, the integration of information by a
cognitive system, the focus and attention and the deliberate control of behaviour', among others (see
Chalmers 1995).
Meanwhile, even the tough problem of consciousness has not avoided the paradigmatic mould
of the computer, supplanting more mechanistic earlier models. John Lilly himself thought of human
beings as 'programmed biocomputers', stating that 'no one of us can escape our own nature as
programmed entities. Each of us may be our programs, nothing more, nothing less' (Lilly 1967, p. 14).
For him, 'in a well-organized biocomputer, there is a critical control metaprogram labelled "I" for acting
on other metaprograms and labelled "me" when acted upon by other metaprograms' (ibid. p. 16).
Consciousness researcher and founder of the above-cited Santa Barbara Institute for
Consciousness Studies B. Alan Wallace observes (while lamenting, like Amit Goswami, the pitfalls of the
dominant intellectual paradigm of scientific materialism and calling it the 'ideology of modernity') that
in many of the disciplines comprising the modern field of cognitive sciencethe neurosciences, artificial
intelligence, philosophy of mind, psychology, linguistics, quantum theory, and evolutionary theory
'The computer has become the central mechanical model of the mind and cognition is identified with
symbolic computations. Thus, cognitive science becomes the study of such cognitive symbolic systems,
and the field of artificial intelligence takes this cognitivist hypothesis literally. During the Scientific
Revolution, some natural philosophers likened the mind to a hydraulic system, and an early twentiethcentury metaphor for the mind was a telephone switchboard. Regardless of how fundamentally
dissimilar the mind is to the latest products of technology, including the modern computer, scientific
materialists have long been convinced that it must be similar to some kind of ingenious, material gadget.
The most salient omission in this regard is consciousness itself, but it is now commonly presumed that
consciousness really boils down to nothing more than information processing' (Wallace 2000, p.125).
And Wallace is most probably right that scientific materialism has usually, whether by conviction or
ingrained habit, been the basis of the majority of modern scientists' thinking, more recently combined
with concepts out of information processing and computing.
For instance, in their book, 'The Computational Brain', neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland
and computer scientist Terry Sejnowski state that 'at this stage in the evolution of science, it appears
highly probable that psychological processes are in fact processes of the physical brain' and that 'once
we understand more about what sort of computers nervous systems are, and how they do whatever it is
they do, we shall have an enlarged and deeper understanding of what it is to compute and represent'
(Churchland & Sejnowski 1994, p.1 & p. 61), which even presupposes that nervous systems are
'computers' of some sort, even as Churchland herself confesses that 'The fact is that we've very little by
way of a fundamental understanding of the brain. We don't know how neurons code information. That's
a lot not to know' (Blackmore 2006, pp.50-51). If pressed on this issue, scientists working in
computational neurobiology and related fields might say that they are using the word 'computer'
metaphorically, but that is the whole point!
Consider also the following type of reasoning by David Chalmers, which sounds slightly more
dualistic than outright materialism but is revealing as to the firm intellectual grip of the latter: 'The hard
problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of
information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect... It is widely agreed that experience arises
from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical
processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it
does' [emphasis added] (Chalmers 1995, p.226). To be fair, the entrenchment of materialism can be
overstatedsometimes it depends on which scientists we are talking about and can also be due to the
11
inertia of the habitual language used to express one's views. This may slightly be the case in our last
quotation because, according to Susan Blackmore, 'The confusion starts with the question itself and
how best to word it. Dave [Chalmers] himself originally worded it with the phrase "give rise to". He also
talks about physical activity being "accompanied by" subjective experience; in fact he defends a version
of property dualism. But this might be completely the wrong way of thinking about the relationship
between brain and consciousness. Perhaps, as the Churchlands [i.e. philosophers Patricia and Paul
Churchland] argue, brain activity just is experience, or perhaps, as [philosopher] John Searle argues,
brains cause experiences' (Blackmore 2006, p. 4). Blackmore herself curiously makes no secret of the
fact that she doesn't think dualism (i.e. the notion that consciousness and the physical world represent
different realms, or substances) is a good idea, despite having told us about the 'yawning chasm'
between mind and matter that we must not ignore.
At any rate, if presented with an orthodox scientist, one's bet would be that he or she would be
(consciously or not) under the sway of scientific materialism to no small degree and that they would
most probably treat consciousness as an epiphenomenon, i.e. a phenomenon emerging from certain
complex structures such as the brain.
All good and well so far, except that we still cannot quite put our finger on what consciousness is
supposed to be. Talking about subjectivity, phenomenology, qualia or awareness is, after all, just using
vaguely synonymous words, which themselves need explaining. (Not that we can ultimately do it
otherwise).
Help isn't exactly forthcoming. In his article 'Consciousness' in the Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, Robert Van Gulick writes that the words conscious and consciousness are 'umbrella terms
that cover a wide variety of mental phenomena' (Van Gulick 2011), which he then proceeds to
systematically explain. Unfortunately, a reading of this and likely many other reputable encyclopedia
entries on the subject may well leave the reader with the feeling that they understand less about the
concept for having read them, even though we are dealing with a concept that is otherwise somehow
intuitively grasped by the lay person. Van Gulick diligently launches into summaries of diverse
explanatory projects and tells us that what we may have thought of as one question of consciousness is
actually three: the descriptive (what?), the explanatory (how?) and the functional (why?, or what for?)
questions; we are invited to consider various kinds of consciousness, such as sentience, wakefulness,
self-consciousness, transitive consciousness, narrative consciousness and access consciousness among
others. One almost gets the feeling that the hope here is that, (just like many scientists think that
consciousness itself arises), the answer will somehow come out of complexitythe complexity of our
knowledge about it, quote: 'consciousness is a complex feature of the world, and understanding it will
require a diversity of conceptual tools for dealing with its many differing aspects' (Van Gulick 2011).
At the same time, even though the article in question states that 'as phenomenologists have
known for more than a century, discovering the structure of conscious experience demands a rigorous
inner-directed stance that is quite unlike our everyday form of self-awareness' and that 'skilled
observation of the needed sort requires training, effort and the ability to adopt alternative perspectives
on one's experience', the author fails to make a single mention of Hindu philosophy or Yogaancient
disciplines devoted to the study and evolution of consciousness by 'rigorous and inner-directed
practices', generally referred to as meditation. The reason for that may be a fundamental rift: for
Western philosophers and scientists, consciousness is first and foremost an aspect of the mind, which is
basically thought of by most as a computing brain with a nervous system, whereas in Hindu thought and
Zen Buddhism, mind is the first thing to be got rid of in order to get to 'pure consciousness', which is
seen as the 'ground of all being'.
Also, and relevant to our main subject matter here, the rift between Western philosophical
notions on one hand, and Eastern yogic and Vedantic (i.e. based on the teachings of the Upanishads)
conceptions of consciousness on the other, is also probably in no small part due to the different
12
languages that formal modern science and traditional Indian thought use. One would be very surprised
to be able to rise to a prominent role or perhaps even just get a degree in mainstream psychology or
physics if he or she reasons using terms like brhman'the unchanging reality amidst and beyond the
world' (in one translation, see Puligandla 1997, p. 222), which is also said to be indefinable, and
tman'the soul', or 'brhman in a pot [i.e. the body]' (cf. White 1996, p. 18). The McKenna-Lilly
disparity we started with was probably mostly due to mismatched definitions, but in the case of
traditional Eastern versus modern Western science we simultaneously have a clash of both worldviews
and disparate language, even in translation. Which is unfortunate because, for example, if we do not
readily dismiss it for its religious overtones, brhman and its conception as 'non-dual' and
'transcendental' reality (cf. Indich 2000, pp. 2-3) is not really unscientific at all. If the smallest possible
basis for language and thought is a binary system of difference, then a supposed non-duality must be
undefinable and therefore transcend our logical and conceptual systems.
Sure, the Advaita (i.e. 'non-dual') Vedanta vision of brhman as the ultimate reality is itself an
unprovable conjecture2, but conjectures are hardly unscientific either. For instance, one of the great
physicists of the 20th century, John Wheeler, conjectured that 'black holes have no hair', which is the
physicist's colloquial way of saying that 'the collapsed state of any nonrotating massive star could be
described by Schwartzschild's solution' (Hawking 2001, p. 112). Colourful though this example may be, it
does suggest that the language divide between Vedantic thought and Western positivist and materialist
science is not simply due to foreign-sounding Sanskrit words, which are most probably less alien to the
non-expert than the term 'Schwartzschild's solution', but is also a consequence of their perceived
religiosity and the frequent use within Vedanta (in its English rendering) of words we do know and have
feelings about, like spirit and bliss, or 'equations' such as existence is consciousness (cf. Indich 2000, p. 4).
This despite the fact that nowadays 'Consciousness causes collapse of the wave function' is one of the
well-known, if controversial, interpretations of the quantum measurement problemthat a conscious
observer is necessary to determine what reality is in the first place, thus in effect saying that, in a certain
sense, consciousness is existence. At the same time, fundamental physics derives many of its modern
truths from the very different linguistic medium of higher mathematics, truths that few can 'understand'
or relate to conceptually, including physicistshence the various competing interpretations of quantum
theory.
So let us take a closer look at the traditional Hindu view of reality and consciousness, and how it
has influenced some modern thinkers and scientists. Michael Talbot (who was, incidentally, one of the
early popularisers of the holographic model of the universe) gives us a succinct summary: 'The Hindus
call the implicate [i.e. fundamental] level of reality Brahman. Brahman is formless but it is the birthplace
of all forms in visible reality, which appear out of it and then enfold back into it in endless flux. Like
[physicist David] Bohm, who says that the implicate order can just as easily be called spirit, the Hindus
sometimes personify this level of reality and say that it is composed of pure consciousness. Thus,
consciousness is not only a subtler form of matter, but it is more fundamental than matter, and in the
Hindu cosmogony it is matter that has emerged from consciousness, and not the other way around. Or
as the Vedas put it, the physical world is brought into being through both the "veiling" and "projecting"
powers of consciousness' (Talbot 1996, p. 288).
Physician and holistic health-guru Deepak Chopra, deeply influenced by traditional Vedanta
teachings and always eager to re-express them in modern terms, presents a similar sweeping view of
consciousness: 'Consciousness is not a by-product of evolution as has been suggested... consciousness is
the common ground of existence that ultimately differentiates into space, time, energy, information
and matter. And the same consciousness is responsible for our thoughts, for our emotions and feelings,
for our behaviours, for our personal relationships, for our social interactions, for the environments that
2
Strictly speaking it is little more than giving a name to such an imagined ultimate reality.
13
we find ourselves in, and for our biology. In other words, consciousness is the common ground that
differentiates into everything that we call reality, including the observer and the objects of our
observation' (Chopra 2007). He also states, in opposition to a large body of materialistic scientific
thought: 'Consciousness is not an epiphenomenon. Consciousness is the phenomenon and everything
else is the epiphenomenon' (Chopra 2005). This is allegedly because 'Before infinite consciousness
observes itself, there is neither space, nor time, nor matter. Nor is there causality... Interacting with
itself, infinite consciousness first creates the mind, then it creates the body, then it creates the physical
world. Everything we call physical is a translation of different vibratory frequencies of consciousness in
the mind. And the mind, in turn, is an interpretation of consciousness unto itself' (Chopra 2011, Ch. 8).
Chopra is convinced that Chalmers' hard problem 'becomes much easier when we give consciousness a
primary role instead of making it secondary to the brain' (Chopra 2013, p.270).
This may sound ambitious, but Chopra is certainly not alone. The primacy of 'pure'
consciousness has had many high-profile advocates, from musician George Harrison to actor Jim Carrey
to comedian Russell Brand. Filmmaker and long-time practitioner of Transcendental Meditation David
Lynch offers the following view: 'Consciousness is such an abstraction. We all have it. We don't think
that much about it, but it's the "I am"-ness, being, our ability to understand, our awareness, our
wakefulness, our inner happiness. And there's a great, giant ocean of pure consciousness within every
human being' (Lynch 2005). The official website for the Transcendental Meditation movement, of
which David Lynch is part, states that 'the technique allows your mind to settle inward beyond thought
to experience the source of thoughtpure awareness, also known as transcendental consciousness.
This is the most silent and peaceful level of consciousnessyour innermost Self' (cf. URL under
References).
A number of quantum physicists, too, have weighed in with their sophisticated metaphors and
elaborate the 'consciousness-as-primary' and related ideas, which are, in the colourful phrase of one of
them, 'not yet a bandwagon by any means, but neither a lonely cart' (Goswami 1995, p. 169). One of the
greatest physicists of the 20th century, Erwin Schrdinger, wrote in the 1940s: 'Consciousness is never
experienced in the plural, only in the singular... there is only one thing and that what seems to be a
plurality is merely a series of different personality aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception
(the Indian MAJA) ... What is this "I"? If you analyse it closely you will, I think, find that it is... little more
than a collection of single data (experiences and memories), namely the canvas upon which they are
collected. And you will, on close introspection, find that what you really mean by "I" is that ground-stuff
upon which they are collected' (Schrdinger 1944, pp. 88-89). In the last decade of the previous century,
Fred Alan Wolfaka Dr. Quantumunequivocally stated that 'there's just one basic being, one basic
consciousness, of which we're all parts in some mysterious way ... I mean, everything is basically
consciousness' (Wolf #S450). And, more recently: 'Unity consciousness, because it's so unthinkable is
nevertheless the fundamental ground of being out of which everything arises. And this is evident to me
not only from spirituality but it's also evident to me from the quantum physical understanding of how
the universe comes into being. It can't just come into being through mechanical means. We've tried,
believe me, physicists are looking for all the mechanical ways they could possibly seek, to find a
mechanical means by which "God" could be left out of the equation. And we haven't been able to do it.
Somewhere along the line, a miracle has to happen. And it's disturbing, because science doesn't want
miraclesscience wants to have everything explained in terms of objective fact. There is something unobjective, or subjective, about the nature of reality' (Wolf 2010). Perhaps it was statements like these
that prompted American psychiatrist Brian Weiss to remark that 'physicists have become the mystics of
our own age, bridging miracles and science' (Weiss 2012, p.215).
Quantum physicist Amit Goswami is adamant that 'when we introduce consciousness as the
ground of being, as transcendent, as one, as self-referent in uswhich is what the spiritual teachers of
the world have taughtthen the quantum debate can be settled and the paradoxes resolved' (Goswami
14
2006, p.16), with one of the major paradoxes in question being the so called observer effect, or 'how do
the quantum possibilities become an actuality of experience simply through the interaction of our
consciousness, by simply us observing them?' (Goswami 2008, p.21). Goswami espouses monistic
idealism as the solution and, naturally, supports the view that it is consciousness that collapses the wave
function and 'by the process of observation chooses one of the many facets of the superposition. ...
According to monistic idealism objects are already in consciousness as primordial, transcendent,
archetypal possibility forms. The collapse consists not of doing something to objects via observing but
of choosing and of recognizing the result of that choice' (Goswami 1995, p.84). However, if
consciousness is already primary and omnipresent, then what does 'observing' and 'recognizing' have to
do with choosing quantum states? Goswami's answer is not really satisfactory: 'The measurement is not
complete without the inclusion of the immanent awareness... We have to make a distinction between
consciousness with awareness and without awareness. The collapse of the wave function takes place in
the former case but not in the latter' (Goswami 1995, pp.97-98).
Solipsism, or the idea that only the self is certain to exist, is obviously related to the philosophy
of the Upanishads and has been entertained in the West. At the age of 26, Wittgenstein wrote in his
notebook: 'The limits of my language stand for the limits of my world. There really is only one world soul,
which I for preference call my soul and as which alone I conceive what I call the souls of others. The
above remark gives the key for deciding the way in which solipsism is a truth' (Wittgenstein 1961, p.49e).
John Lennon, also at 26, wrote the lyrics to the Beatles song I Am The Walrus, beginning with the
following cryptic sentence: I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together. Of the two,
Lennon's quote is perhaps closer in style to traditional Vedantic thought than Wittgenstein's and also to
the truth according to Goswami, who, in resolving the paradox of Wigner's friend (a version of the
fabled Schrdinger's cat thought experiment; cf. Goswami 1995, pp. 84-86) from his idealist monist
standpoint, says that the paradox arises only when one makes 'the unwarranted dualist assumption that
his consciousness is separate from his friend's' and 'disappears if there is only one subject, not separate
subjects as we normally understand them', later clarifying that, 'When I observe, what I see is the whole
world of manifestation, but this is not solipsism, because there is no individual I that sees as opposed to
other I's' (ibid. p.86). In our mind, however, both Wittgenstein's note and Lennon's line are more or less
different takes on a fundamentally equivalent theoretical situation. The realisation that there is no
individual 'I' but only universal consciousness is still something that has arisen in Goswami's mind,
whose supposed existence is a figment in ours, as all this is currently in yours, our esteemed reader. It
could be a matter of taste, epistemological affinity, preferred narrative, or degree of egocentrism.
As a slight side note, and going back to Lennon's enigmatic quote, although its author
deliberately set out, by his own admission, to write the most confusing lyrics he could in that particular
song, 'the first line was written on one acid trip one weekend' (Sheff 2000, p.184). This was, after all, the
sixties, but throughout the 20th century mainstream science did not, or could not, come to a mature
view regarding the relationship between perturbation of consciousness and reality. Honest and open
accounts from serious researchers of consciousness are rare (although both John Lilly and Terence
McKenna certainly contributed a lot in that department), but here is one from mathematician and
psycho-physiologist Stephen LaBerge from his interview with Susan Blackmore: 'I learned one
important lesson from LSD: under its influence I saw living, breathing hieroglyphics superimposed on a
blank wall, and thought, "Ah, so this is what the world is really like, overflowing with meaning, beauty
and complexity. How could I not have seen it before!" But then the next day, "Ah, wait a minute, this is
what it's like, that was just an illusion." And finally to realize, no, it's neither like this nor like that, those
are just my mind's understanding of what the world is, and the world remains a mystery' (Blackmore
2006, p.138). Perturbing one's normal state of mind, along with focusing attention on attention
(meditation), presumably must have an important role to play in working out what consciousness and
reality are (especially given possible and long-overdue changes in the political and cultural climate
15
surrounding some of these things, say, during this century). As LaBerge argues: 'We need scientists who
understand the brain but also have their own experiences' (Blackmore 2006, p.147). McKenna,
incidentally, frequently referred to psychedelic substances as 'boundary-dissolving'. Could it be that
they potentially provide cognitive access to a higher level of organisation, a self that is in the normally
'inviolate' level (in Hofstadter's sensesee below) of an individual ego and thus allow the subject to
identify with fellow human beings and the rest of nature as parts of a whole, as seems to have happened
in Lennon's case? It is certainly ironic that insights gained through altered states of consciousness are so
often dismissed as confused ramblings and hallucinations by respectable 20th-century scientists, even
as some of the best in their midst have called the self a 'hallucination' (Hofstadter 2008, p. 315), which is
produced by a 'deception' (see Schrdinger's quote above).
Consciousness conceived as the ground of all being is a worldview away from that of most
modern scientists who assume we live in a world featuring a conscious/unconscious dichotomy which is
difficult to resolve, or as mathematician and cosmologist Roger Penrose puts it, 'there's nothing in our
physical theory of what the universe is like which says anything about why some things should be
conscious and other things not' (Blackmore 2006, p.173). The working assumption usually seems to be
that consciousness somehow arises out of complexity. Renowned cognitive scientist Douglas
Hofstadter expresses the point thus: 'The key point here is that there is some level of complexity at
which a creature starts applying some of its categories to itself, starts building mental structures that
represent itself, starts placing itself in some kind of "intellectual perspective" in relationship to the rest
of the world' (Hofstadter 2008, p.82). This view is certainly very reasonable because we can all intuitively
feel a continuum of increasing intelligence from, say, a rock to an ant to a dog to a human. However, in
the process, we have made an 'unconscious' jump: we have started to use apparent intelligence as a
yardstick for consciousness. Some like neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran hold a strong view on
the subject: 'I think animals don't have consciousness or qualia... animals in general, even higher
primates, excluding humans, have only a raw background awareness. But they're lacking extra stuff
which I have called meta-awareness' (Blackmore 2006, p.188).
Ramachandran shares with Hofstadter the view that self-reflexivity is central to consciousness.
In the words of the latter, people are 'self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages that are little
miracles of self-reference' (Hofstadter 2008, p.363). Ramachandran expresses the point thus: 'In a sense
you have to know that you know, otherwise you don't know. That's the crux of the matter, and that's
why you need the sense of self, which knows that it knows' (Blackmore 2006, p.190).
Hofstadter likens 'selves (or "I's" or "souls", if you preferwhatever it is that distinguishes
animate from inanimate matter) to certain special swirly, twisty, vortex-like, and meaningful patterns
that arise only in particular types of systems of meaningless symbols' (Hofstadter 1999, p. xx). He treats
inanimate molecules and meaningless symbols as analogous (given the right configuration out of the
former arise animate beings and out the lattermeaning) and holds the notion of these vortex-like
patterns that he calls 'strange loops', or 'tangled hierarchies', as the 'key to unravelling the mystery that
we conscious beings call "being" or "consciousness"' (ibid. p. xx). His formal definition of a Tangled
Hierarchy is as follows: 'What I mean by "strange loop" is not a physical circuit but an abstract loop in
which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of
abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet
somehow the successive "upward" shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle. That is, despite ones
sense of departing ever further from ones origin, one winds up, to ones shock, exactly where one had
started out. In short, a strange loop is a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop' (Hofstadter 2008, p.
101). A classic example of such a tangled hierarchy is the famous M. C. Escher lithograph 'Drawing
Hands', where two hands are seen paradoxically drawing each other. The paradox is only resolved if one
steps 'out of the picture' and realises that the artist draws it all and the whole thing is thus revealed to be
an illusion from this 'inviolate' (invisible) level. Hofstadter hopefully holds, however, that 'fortunately,
16
there do exist strange loops that are not illusions' (Hofstadter 2008, p. 103), saying 'fortunately' because
his central thesis is that we ourselves are strange loops.
Thus for Hofstadter, contrary to Chopra and Goswami, consciousness is an epiphenomenon:
'Consciousness is the dance of symbols inside the cranium. Or, to make it even more pithy,
consciousness is thinking. As Descartes said, Cogito ergo sum' (Hofstadter 2008, pp. 275-276). This is
obviously far from consciousness seen as the ground of being; on the contrary, it emerges out of
complexity: 'Like Gdels strange loop, which arises automatically in any sufficiently powerful formal
system of number theory, the strange loop of selfhood will automatically arise in any sufficiently
sophisticated repertoire of categories, and once youve got self, youve got consciousness' (ibid. p. 325).
Still, remarkably, Goswami sees a place for Hofstadter's strange loops: 'I suspect that the
situation in the brain-mind, with consciousness collapsing the wave function but only when awareness is
present, is a tangled hierarchy and that our immanent self-reference is of tangled hierarchical origin. An
observation by a self-referential system is where the [quantum superposition] chain stops' (Goswami
1995, pp.99). To make his model work, however, Goswami has to use a linguistic, one might say, sleight
of handhe distinguishes between the 'consciousness' that is the ground of all being and the
'awareness' that an individual mind possesses in order to bring the probability field of quantum
indeterminacy to a 'real' outcome. This is all very fine, provided that he is consistent with his terms (and
it's also true that sometimes we perceive things subconsciously, i.e. outside the focus of our awareness,
and with special techniques it may be possible to retrieve such information), but nevertheless, referring
to one's not-yet-aware ground of being as 'consciousness' seems quite wishfully arbitrary. Similarly,
Hofstadter cannot do without linguistic sleights of hand either, as evidenced by phrases like
'meaningless symbols'. Of course, both of them are all too aware that 'what mathematician Kurt Gdel
proved is that any attempt to produce a paradox-free... system of reasonable richness is doomed to be
incomplete. The system can be either complete but inconsistent or consistent but incomplete'
(Goswami 1995, p. 183).
This might be a good time to remind ourselves that language itself, being a system of
'reasonable richness' is one big Strange Loop; in the words of Hofstadter: 'language does create strange
loops when it talks about itself, whether directly or indirectly. Here, something in the system jumps out
and acts on the system, as if it were outside the system.' (Hofstadter 1999, p. 691). Or, in the words of
theologian Stephen Faller: 'Does it ever seem strange that the entire dictionary is self-referential? We
look up a word we don't know the meaning of, and what do we find? More words. The dictionary is
nothing more than circular logic' (Faller 2004, p.72).3
Stripped down to its bones-and-yolk, the modern chicken-or-egg question and the 'ages-new'
paradigm clash that will most probably yet again fail to resolve itself in this century is the Hofstadter
versus the Goswami type of worldview, that is the materialist-at-its-core idea that (material) form gives
rise to mind through particular types of self-reflexive organisation, against the idea that an out-ofbounds transcendent mind gives rise to all things on our dualistic observer level. It is a 'modern
incarnation of the famous mind-body problem' (Blackmore 2005, p. 2) and it is like the seemingly neverending Evolution vs. Intelligent Design debates of late, while trying to keep things presumably scientific
(although not less zealous in all cases). We shouldn't expect either side to ultimately win. We human
beings may be like computational machines that have reached a critical threshold of representational
universality (cf. Hofstadter 2008, Chapter 17), but Hofstadter cannot gloss over the fact that computers
had an already conscious designer. Likewise, Goswami will forever have to live with the fact that on our
own observer level we have no clue whether a transcendent unitive reality can be meaningfully described
3
We might only add that while the statement "language talks about itself" does seem paradoxical and even 'strangely loopy', it
is just like the hands drawing each otheran illusion. It is we who are doing the talking. Which is an out-of-place remark in a
paper arguing that, in a way, 'the world (including ourselves) is made of language', but... we still haven't got to the conclusion.
17
as consciousness, because 'conscious' is still a word/concept and derives its meaning from the circular
system of differences that is language and also presupposes an 'unconscious' state in order to work.
Whichever view we feel like subscribing to on any particular day, in 'all' likelihood there will be
plenty of subscribers both ways and thus the nature of the problem of consciousness will remain
dualistic even as we keep hearing that 'Dualism does not work. Almost all contemporary scientists and
philosophers agree on this' (Blackmore 2011, p. 14). In fact, given the fundamentally binary nature of
language, information and logic, dualism seems inevitable; dualisms at higher levels of discourse may
even be seen as fractal re-expressions of the basic dichotomy in the makeup of Nature or Mya
(whichever way you wish to see the world), possibly arising out of some kind of basic binary bit function,
but at larger scales. The pendulum of epistemology will most likely continue to go back and forth
between mind and matter and this undecidedness will be the only thing that holds real sway, no pun
pending.
Again and inevitably, certain kinds of metaphors and technological artefacts will serve as
thinking tools in our trying to reflect on consciousness. For technologically and mathematically savvy
cognitive scientists like Hofstadter, such a thinking tool are feedback systems of various kinds (although
for him, simple feedback is not a tangled hierarchy, which has to possess a 'level-crossing' property to
qualify). These include a wide array of things from flush toilets to video feedback to Mandelbrot's fractal
equation. Just like Conway's Game of Life, feedback systems involve iterations of simple rules which can
produce infinite complexity. A video of a fractal zoom is fascinating but even more fascinating perhaps
is the fact that Nature seems to produce a variety of fractal structures such as seashells, for example.
(see, e.g., Arthur Clarke's documentary on fractals: Clarke 1994). The term 'fractal' was only coined by
mathematician Benot Mandelbrot in 1975 but, as yet another computational metaphor, is shaping the
way many think about consciousness and physical reality. For example, Stephen LaBerge remarks that
'Consciousness makes consciousness interesting. It's exactly that self-similar quality, the fractal nature of
it, which makes it so endlessly fascinating' (Blackmore 2006, p.137). Mandelbrot's equation produces
form on an infinite number of scales, but Ramachandran cautions against infinite regress in human
beings: 'I can say "You know that I know that I had an affair with your wife"; but if I say, "I know that you
know that I know that you know that I know", you start losing the thread, like an echo. There are only so
many steps that the brain can handle, and that's adequate for the sense of self. So it's not an endless
regress' (Blackmore 2006, p.190). Again, this seems to conflate processing power with 'consciousness',
but it is true that you cannot zoom into the fractal structure of a head of broccoli past a few
iterationsor so it seems.
Just like in astro- and quantum physics, the holographic metaphor also has promising
explanatory potential in studying consciousness and the brain. This line of research was begun by
neurophysiologist Karl Pribram in the 1960s and curiously does have a 'mystic' connection. In Talbot's
account: 'Which is the true reality, the seemingly objective world experienced by the
observer/photographer or the blur of interference patterns recorded by the camera/brain? Pribram
realized that if the holographic brain model was taken to its logical conclusions, it opened the door on
the possibility that objective reality might not even exist, or at least not in the way we believe it exists.
Was it possible, he wondered, that what the mystics had been saying for centuries was true, reality was
maya, an illusion, and what was out there was really a vast, resonating symphony of wave forms, a
"frequency domain" that was transformed into the world as we know it only after it entered our senses?'
(Talbot 1996, p.31). Terence and brother Dennis McKenna also pick up on the holographic model and
have 'introduced evidence which suggests that the mind itself is holographic in quality and to that
extent reflects its neural substrate... speculated that this holographic structure of the mind may proceed
from the fact that holographic principles operate on many structural levels... found that holographic
principles might also be applied to the structure of reality itself by virtue of the quantum nature of
matter, whose wave-particle qualities suggest a holographic monad', and '[seen] that such a
18
holographic model of reality did not violate the laws of relativity' (McKenna & McKenna 1994, p. 55).
However, they make the very important point that they 'are not prepared to assert the "truth" of [their]
speculations over other models of reality, recognizing that all such models are ultimately constructs of
the human mind, each no "truer" than any other. Nevertheless, a holographic picture of mind and of
external reality has enhanced our understanding of both' (ibid.).
5. Conclusion: Back to Basics

In his 'Book', subtitled 'On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are', philosopher and populariser of
Eastern philosophy in the West Alan Watts devotes a whole chapter to the fundamentally binary nature
of inner and outer reality, reminding us that: 'To the central brain the individual neuron signals either
yes or nothat's all. But, as we know from computers which employ binary arithmetic in which the only
figures are 0 and 1, these simple elements can be formed into the most complex and marvellous
patterns. In this respect our nervous system and 0/1 computers are much like everything else, for the
physical world is basically vibration. Whether we think of this vibration in terms of waves or of particles,
or perhaps wavicles, we never find the crest of a wave without a trough or a particle without an interval,
or space, between itself and others. In other words, there is no such thing as a half wave, or a particle all
by itself without any space around it. There is no on without off, no up without down' (Watts 1966, pp.
25-26). Because of this, he calls life 'The Game of Black-and-White', which people have turned into 'The
Game of White-versus-Black', where White must always win'a fight haunted by a sense of chronic
frustration, because we are doing something as crazy as trying to keep the mountains and get rid of the
valleys' (ibid. p. 35). His view of reality is Advaita Vedantic, with the whole universe being but one Self, in
which all the 'so-called opposites, such as light and darkness, sound and silence, solid and space, on and
off, inside and outside, appearing and disappearing, cause and effect, are poles or aspects of the same
thing' (ibid. p. 34). When it comes to naming that thing, however, Watts is cautious and prefers to call it
just 'IT', because 'language can no more transcend duality than paintings or photographs upon a flat
surface can go beyond two dimensions' (ibid. p. 149), and because 'to define is to limit, to set boundaries,
to compare and to contrast, and for this reason the universe, the all, seems to defy definition' (ibid. p.
141), and 'what lies beyond opposites must be discussed, if at all, in terms of opposites, and this means
using the language of analogy, metaphor, and myth' (ibid. p. 151).
This is the double-bind that language has in its relationship to 'reality'. The simplest form
underlying any kind of logical organisation, including languages or codes and, as some physicists
currently suspectphysical reality, is one derived from an arbitrary binary opposition, whose elements
we can call by different names for convenience, such as zeros and ones in the parlance of the
contemporary computer metaphor, or perhaps the old yin and yang. At the same time, it is and will
likely remain mysterious as everat least one bitas to what it is that gives rise to the basic on/off of
the universe. In the current apparent revival of the ancient wisdom of the Vedas from multiple
viewpoints, it seems tempting to call IT something like 'consciousness' and this paradigm may indeed be
convenient in resolving some quantum physics paradoxes, as Amit Goswami claims. However,
'consciousness' is unfortunately still a wordthat is, part of our human code which cannot reach beyond
itself. So, in a way, bona fide mystics and yogis are not really evading the question when they say that
the ultimate truth cannot be statedthey are not being mysterious, but rather strictly scientific. In the
words of one contemporary yoga master from India, 'It is impossible to pen such an ineffable and lofty
state of Truth... Brahma Nirvana, the Be-ness About Whom Naught May Be Said' (Siddhanath 2006, p.
205). To the extent that one does say something about the Ultimate Reality, he or she is already
necessarily in the realm of myth, just like the author of the last quote calls the ultimate reality a 'Truth'
19
and a state of 'Be-ness', where 'the yogi, having crossed the light barrier of relativity... goes beyond the
naked singularity' (ibid.), whereas the domain in question thus defined must be well beyond truth/nontruth, being/non-being and so on. This is how language/code is both the end and the beginning of reality.
'Ultimate' reality, whatever that is, begins where language stops, while 'our' reality starts where
language does.
Thus, it may be a meaningful coincidence that 'information' comes from the Latin word
informare, meaning to 'give form', thus revealing itself as a lovely metaphor uniting code and
dimensionality. At the same time, it surely must be more than a coincidence that the formulas for
information entropy and thermodynamic entropy, the former mathematician Claude Shannon's
measure of the quantity of information content and the latterphysicist Ludwig Boltzmann's measure
of 'the probability of finding a [physical] system in a particular state' (Kumar 2011, p.24), are very similar
and 'conceptually equivalent', with the difference 'a matter of convention' (cf. Bekenstein 2003, p. 60).
On a less fundamental level, our descriptions of 'life, the universe and everything' are always
clothed in the metaphors of our times and the narratives that we choose to lend credence to. Religions
are a good example of narratives people invest a lot in, but even just within quantum physics, there is no
agreement as to what interpretations should be given to certain equations which seem to otherwise
produce correct experimental results. This is why many physicists prefer to stick to the mathematics
without asking too many questions, but this situation is not exactly satisfying and, as we have seen,
there have been attempts to pursue an informatics-meets-physics type of science that studies a realm
possibly underlying that of quantum physics. In the current epistemological vacuum, and especially
given the reaffirmed role of mind and the observer in the constitution of 'reality', we may expect the
recent trend of resurrecting old Vedic notions such as the illusory nature of the dualistic world and
consciousness as the ground of being to persist, merging with modern notions and narratives (as in the
movie 'The Matrix'), and helping to shape scientific and philosophical discourse on the nature of Nature
in this century.
Much of all this must have been on McKenna's mind when he made the statement that was
quoted at the start, and that should hopefully sound much less arcane by now. In making it, he was only
reaffirming the realisation that Watts had come to in the middle of the last century, but along slightly
different linesby seeing that in a way 'everything is code', and also by realising the important
mediation of language in our communication and abstract thinking: 'The world is made of language. In
other words, if you ask a scientist what is the world made of, he will tell you it's made of electrons and
force fields and this sort of thing, but notice that these are all words and that behind these words stand
the deeper languages of mathematics. Whatever the world really is, what we experience and what we
communicate to each other is entirely couched within the medium of language. So, language is the
primary determinant of the experience of being and science has chosen to be very naive about this. It's
only in the 20th century that these issues have even been raised. Before that, before quantum physics,
scientists had blithely believed that they were observing an independent reality that their observations
had no effect on. Since quantum physics, we now know that there is a much more complicated situation
prevailingthat mind somehow is a necessary ingredient in the becoming of the world, and that this
"becoming of the world", whatever it is for itself, for mind it is something which happens in the domain
of language. In going through language, it takes upon itself the character of language and leaves behind
much of the character of whatever it was before that. You know, Wittgenstein talked about the
"unspeakable"this is what he was referring to, this dimension antecedent to language, and it is
unspeakable' (McKenna 1994a). This 'unspeakable' realm is exactly what Lilly was referring to when we
quoted him at the beginning of this paper, speaking about 'higher realities beyond language' and 'union
with God' (i.e. yoga).
If language is the domain of all provisional reality, then we may be justified in asking: which
language? Languages come in many varieties and the confounding effect of this has been known at
20
least since the time of the mythological Tower of Babel. Dialects and sociolects complicate the picture
even further. Meanwhile, the much-criticised 'Sapir-Whorf' hypothesis has made a bit of a comeback,
and the work of linguists such as Lera Boroditsky is making it demonstrably clear that linguistic relativity
must be true, though not to the romanticised extent that Benjamin Whorf used to elevate it. The picture
in science is not very different. As Benjamin Whorf himself observed a long time ago, 'what we call
"scientific thought" has developed not only a set of different dialectics, but actually a set of different
dialects. These dialects are now becoming mutually unintelligible' (Whorf 1941, p. 246). The problem of
fuzzy definitions arises even within more narrow fields of research. For example: 'The ambiguity of the
term "consciousness" is often exploited by both philosophers and scientists writing on the subject. It is
common to see a paper begin with an invocation of the mystery of consciousness [i.e. the "hard
problem"]... In the second half, the tone becomes more optimistic, and the author's own theory of
consciousness is outlined. Upon examination, this theory turns out to be a theory of one of the more
straightforward phenomena' (Chalmers 1995, p. 226).
Physicists' arbiter of speakable truth is mathematics which, as Kurt Gdel showed, cannot
ultimately prove itself as a system and which is, after all, a 'linguistic apparatus', as Whorf thought of it.
Still, even physicists cannot escape having to deal with the firm grip of what is more conventionally
meant by the term 'human language'. For example, in arguing for the physical validity of the concept of
a beginning and an end of time, Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose 'had sidestepped Kant's antimony
of pure reason by dropping his implicit assumption that time had a meaning independent of the
universe' (Hawking 2001, p. 41). That is, they had to convince their colleagues with the force of 'the
mathematical theorems that [they] had proved', as much as they had to work to change the very
accepted meaning of the word 'time' as 'most physicists still instinctively disliked the idea of it having a
beginning or end' (ibid. 43).
It is a well-known fact in sociolinguistics that 'languages are not created equal' and right now,
the specialised language known as mathematics reigns supreme among the determinants of scientific
truth when it comes to cosmology. Like all kings, however, it depends on a board of sundry advisors and
so nowadays it is not that unusual to hear cosmologists speak the language of Vedanta. We as a species
operate in the domain of human language and even though someone might come up with a beautiful
formula, it still has to be interpreted. Like all kings, mathematics is not all-powerful and has trouble with
concepts such as 'infinity' and 'ultimate proofs' as much as any other logical system. Nevertheless, it has
been tremendously successful in zooming into the nature of reality during modernitya period that has
generally been ruled by the materialist scientific viewwhile paradoxically basing itself on the concept
of number, which abstracts thought from matter in a most striking way (three times one apple being
equal to three apples basically meaning that all three apples have to be one and the same, which is not
something that we observe in the 'real' world).
Meanwhile, if one of the dominant metaphors for understanding the world and ourselves was
'the computer' in the past half century or so, these days people are gradually learning to think in terms
of 'networks'. Increasingly, many will be tempted or even irresistibly drawn to compare the wiring of the
brain to the biggest and most complex network ever created by manthe Internet. There are already
some that openly speculate whether the Internet might develop a mind of its own. To give just one
relatively recent example, according to brain scientist and entrepreneur Jeffrey Stibel, 'With computers,
we have tried to find that analogy. We say that semiconductors switch on and off like neurons and that
fibres of glass can transmit messages as do synapses and axons. Beyond that, however, we've come to a
dead end... A computer itself is not like a brain. But then there is the Internet... It is unbounded, selfperpetuating, and capable of collective consciousness... It processes information, shapes it, transmits
it... For these reasons... I offer you this simple analogy: as the artificial pump is to the heart, as the
camera is to the eye, and as the hinge is to the joint, I believe that the Internet is to the brain. In fact, I'll
go one better than that. I believe that the Internet is a brain' (Stibel 2009, pp. xvi-xvii).
21
In conclusion, it may be useful to reiterate this paper's basic theses as to how McKenna's claim
that 'reality is made of language' can be meaningfully and scientifically construed as more than a funny
idea. The chief propositions have been: (i) A dichotomy is the most basic kind of difference and
difference is the basis for all structure; an arbitrary binary code has been identified as the simplest form
of encoding information and the same may well turn out to be true for physical reality. (ii) The moment
we say something about a supposed (pre-binary, and thus unspeakable) ultimate reality, we have started
a myth clothed in language (often deciding to stand on one side or the other of a classic chicken-andegg question), which we can then choose to go on and elaborate. (iii) Ubiquitous metaphors shape our
thinking and are integrated into our myths. (iv) Both physical reality and language exhibit a structure
composed of a series of planes with principles of organisation at every level that are not easily relatable
to operational laws on other levels, which fact may lend additional suggestive power to the
language/code view of reality. (v) A mild form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis looks increasingly plausible
and different languages, as used by different cultures, create momentum for thinking along slightly
different lines, thus colouring our perceptions of reality differently (this is true of both natural and
scientific languages). Different media of expression of meaning similarly have a non-trivial effect. (vi)
The general phenomenon of language, itself a medium, substitutes to a significant extent one reality for
another; we end up with a reduced/altered/augmented version of the 'original' reality of primary
perception. (vii) All fundamental theories of existence stand on the shoulders of one pre-binary 'free
miracle' (as McKenna used to put it), and people have called that unexplained mystery God, the Big
Bang, or Transcendental Consciousness, among others. What comes beyond that are different
incomplete narratives and myths. We choose according to our personal biases, or as Lilly would have
itour programs and metaprograms.
And finally, when we say that 'reality is made of language' we have obviously used language (a
word whose archetype is the human tongue) itself as an expanded metaphor encompassing various
things like binary code, large symbolic systems, human languages and story-telling, and placed it at
rock-bottom stripped to its essencean arbitrary binary difference. And because no one can explain
what this rock-bottom sits on, the metaphor is at least as good as any other chief pretender: elementary
particles, a computer program, zeros and ones in a matrix, a primordial self, and so (back and) forth. In
fact, one could stand the triangle of Language-Mind-Physical reality on any of its sides and argue in
favour of that as being fundamental with equal, if limited, success. We don't know of anything that is
not 'made of something'. Similarly, anything we perceive or decide to claim has to be a product of our
mind. And in our case, all proposed bed-rock hypotheses about the nature of reality have to come in the
form of some language. Sticking with the language metaphor, and combining it with the old parable of
peeling an onion, we might say what is really happening is that, in our efforts to understand and explain
the world, we create a loop of words/concepts around a vaguely grasped notion of some primary (and
possibly non-dual) reality, and strive to ensnare it tighter and tighter, while the thing we are after may
probably best be described as the very hole created by our linguistic lasso. Using the strange loop that is
language as a world-explaining metaphor might be taking McLuhan's famous and enigmatic aphorism,
'The medium is the message', to a difficult-to-accept extreme perhaps, but then again, explaining the
world is extremely difficult, nay... aye.
Graduate School of Economics,
Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo
22
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Is The World Made of Language (Milen Martchev)

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SMALL MOUTH NOISES AN OPEN-ACCESS JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE, MIND & PHILOSOPHY

IS THE WORLD MADE OF LANGUAGE?

3. From Hard Facts to Soft Wares

The square of the Planck length. The Planck length, or about 10

cm is the fundamental length scale related to gravity and

4. A 21-century Ancient Paradigm: Consciousness

5. Conclusion: Back to Basics

Transcendental Meditation Website: <http://www.tm.org> Accessed May, 2014.

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