Frontpage Summary Full text (free) Audiobook (free) Buy the book Videos Podcasts

18.1. The magical laws

In an idealistic, mental world, there must be «laws of nature» that unite the three existential categories of matter, abstractions, and subjective experience.

We, on the other hand, idealists as we are, can answer that abstraction is thought.

We can rest assured that subjective experiences are also thought, or at least something mental. Most people agree on that, including the materialists.

Only in one area do we have to declare that we are in opposition; we say that everything material must also be mental perceptions, thought, subjective experiences.

How can we show that we are right?

We have already talked a bit about that, and then I said that we have to make probable beyond doubt, come up with convincing clues, and use logic and common sense.

The materialists can not explain how subjective consciousness arises. But can we, who consider consciousness to be fundamental, do the opposite, that is, explain materialism?

We are already well underway with this.

In the preceding chapters, I have shown how the elementary building blocks in the universe can arise through idealistic emergence.

But the universe is more than building blocks. They come together and form everything possible, from bacteria to skyscrapers, light bulbs to deserts, humans to neutron stars.

There is an insane variety of «things» in the universe.

Can we explain all this only by utilising mental, subjective mechanisms?

These are the mechanisms and laws we are seeking, which I will now present to you.

Emergence explains how things come into being, but not how they interact and play together in the insanely complex system that the universe constitutes.

We need the mental complexity laws.

Such laws must exist because light, for example, is both material (photons in motion), something abstract (the electromagnetic field) and simultaneously creates the subjective experience of colour, yellow – the quale.

We are missing something, namely, the laws that unite all three existential categories and explain how these interact.

Now you will get to know what magically makes everything come together.

So, we're getting started.