Universal Consciousness as the Ground of Logic

Abstract

Shortly after the Second World War, Aldous Huxley published a book defending what he called ›the perennial philosophy,‹ a metaphysical theory he argued had arisen 2,500 years earlier and had subsequently cropped up in many and varied cultures across the globe.1 According to Huxley, the view did not emerge from abstract philosophical speculation but because its truth came to be directly known to various individuals whilst in altered states of consciousness, in many cases the result of intense meditative training. What was the content of this view? In standard analytic philosophy of mind, we distinguish between the subject of a given experience and the phenomenal qualities which characterise what it’s like to have that experience. In an experience of pain, for example, there is the thing which feels the pain (e.g. me) and there is the qualitative character of how the pain feels; the former is the subject of the experience, the latter is its phenomenal quality. In the altered states of consciousness discussed by Huxley, however, this division apparently collapses resulting in a state of pure or ›universal‹ consciousness: consciousness unencumbered by phenomenal qualities. More dramatically, people who achieve these states of consciousness claim that it becomes apparent to them, from the perspective of the altered state of consciousness, that universal consciousness is the backdrop to all individual conscious experiences, and hence that in a significant sense universal consciousness is the ultimate nature of each and every conscious mind. This realization allegedly undermines ordinary understanding of the distinctions between different people and leads to a conviction that in some deep sense »we are all one«. This is not a view that has been explored a great deal in the context of analytic philosophy, which tends to proceed by building coldblooded rational arguments for a given position, rather than by intuiting its truth via altered states of consciousness. However, Miri Albahari has recently presented just such a coldblooded defence of the perennial philosophy, arguing that it offers a better solution to the problem of consciousness than rival theories.2 I am fascinated, but ultimately unconvinced, by her argument. I would like here